"Drawing Our Animal Friends", Winter 2011

"Drawing Our Animal Friends"

The Kennett After-School Association provides a unique program known as After-The-Bell whose mission is to provide a supervised afterschool program of recreational, social, and academic skill-developing activities for Kennett Middle School students. The program is led by community volunteers and provided without charge. After-The-Bell runs in three six week cycles on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Immediately after school, students enjoy a healthy snack followed by two one-hour activities.

Have fun exploring your creativity in animal drawing. Animals have such a range in personality and appearance - they are essentially living art. Drawing media, from charcoal to pastel, will be used to study animal forms, textures and patterns. We will meet once at University of Pennsylvania's Veterinary New Bolton Center to observe and photograph live domesticated animals and once at the Delaware Museum of Natural History to make keen sketch observations of wildlife specimens in recreated natural habitats. Class time will range from warm-up exercises to longer observational drawings from photographs projected onto a screen. Students may also work from their own photographs from the two trips and/or their own personal photography. Everyone will be able to take home drawing materials, paper and sketchbooks, since inspiration can strike at any time. Imagery has more depth if it is the result of first hand experience by the artist, so we will only reference our own photography or life observation and will not use magazine or book photography. Let's take the time to understand and bring to life portrayals of our friends, whether they are fuzzy, feathery or scaly!

This project was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency, through its regional arts funding partnership, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PPA). State government funding for the arts depends upon an annual appropriation by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. PPA is administered in this region by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Additional support of the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PPA) Partnership in Southeastern Pennsylvania is provided by PECO.

Instructor, Kelly McConnell Cox

Kelly McConnell Cox is a professional artist, working in Chester County. While Kelly displayed a talent in art since she was very young, her professional training began as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware in Newark, where she received awards for her artistic achievement and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree. Soon after, she earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the prestigious Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Her work portrays her local surroundings, the Jersey Shore. Her love of animals and open space is revealed in her most recent work. After two eye-opening trips to Tanzania, Africa, Kelly has been painting exotic animals in their natural habitat. She is also known for her striking commissioned portraits of people and pets. For more information please visit: www.studiovilleinc.com

Lesson 1

"Drawing our Animal Friends" / After The Bell

Instructor: Kelly McConnell Cox - you can call me Kelly

1/26/2011 Lesson #1

Blind contour drawing: Is a drawing method in which the student, fixing their eyes on the outline of the model or object, draws the contour very slowly in a steady, continuous line without lifting the pencil or looking at the paper. The end result doesn't matter - what is important is carefully observing the subject. The purpose of blind contour drawing is to improve your eye / hand communication skills.

Linear Drawing: Refers to line

Gesture Drawing: is the practice of drawing a series of poses taken by a model, in this case an animal, in a short amount of time, often as a warm up exercise.

Sketch: a sketch usually refers to a quick, informal drawing, usually done from life. A sketch captures the essentials of the subject - the overall form and perspective (angle), a sense of volume, movement and feeling: sometimes a suggestion of light and shade. A sketch should not be overworked. A sketch may be created in any medium, though pencil is the most common. Sketches are a great way to plan a more finished piece.

Upside-Down Drawing: Observe a photograph of an animal upside-down. This will help you develop your observational skills by eliminating the idea of what you are drawing. For example: You are drawing a dog, but by flipping the image you are then able to see this specific dog as opposed to a generic idea of a dog.

Lesson 2

Drawing our Animal Friends - Lesson 2

Kelly McConnell Cox / Instructor

Charcoal Studies / Charcoal Drawings heightened with white

Studies: Also known as details, studies are drawing portions. Ex. You may draw just an eye instead of an entire portrait or you might rather pay close attention to how fur looks without having to worry about the form of the animal that you are observing.

Monochrome: Refers to one color or shades of one color. In this case our one color is a grayscale or black and white - charcoal

Hatching: Is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing closely spaced parallel lines. The quantity, thickness and spacing of the lines will affect the brightness of the overall image, and emphasize forms by creating the illusion of volume.

Cross Hatching: Hatch marks that overlap to help create shadow, form and volume

Tonal Drawing: As opposed to linear drawing, where the edges of the observed object are described by line, soft transitions of tones that are created by a series of hatch marks describe shadow, light and volume

Value: Refers to dark and light (aka, shade). Ex. The darkest value is black and the lightest value is white

Mid Tone: The middle most value. In this case our mid tone is the color of the paper.

Polychromatic: Involves multiple colors

Primary Colors: Red, Yellow and Blue

Complementary Colors: Colors opposite each other on the color wheel. Ex. Red vs. Green, Blue vs. Orange, Yellow vs. Violet.

Color Wheel: A chart in which complementary colors are arranged on opposite sides of a circle

African Animal studies:

1. Charcoal Studies on newsprint for warm up and then one or two finished charcoal, heightened with white studies on Canson paper.

2. Pastel practice on newsprint and then one or two pastel studies on Canson paper

Visit to Cherry Knoll Farm

After-The-Bell would like to send a special thanks to Cherry Knoll Farm owners, Mr. and Mrs. Duprey. Cherry Knoll Farm is home to high performance dressage horses that have competed both nationally and internationally and also home to prize winning Black Angus cattle. The best drawings come from first hand experience with the depicted subject. Here we not only saw these beautiful animals in their home, but we experienced their personalities, learned some science and even got to pet them! This was even the instructor's favorite day!

Drawing Our Animal Friends - Lesson 3

Kelly McConnell Cox / Instructor

Pastel Drawings / Cherry Knoll Farm

Color Wheel: A chart in which complementary colors are arranged on opposite sides of a circle

Polychromatic: Involves multiple colors

Primary Colors: Red, Yellow and Blue

Complementary Colors: Colors opposite each other on the color wheel. Ex. Red vs. Green, Blue vs. Orange, Yellow vs. Violet

Ways to Apply:

Dark to Light: This is how you draw with pastels. The lighter colors have less binder in them, which makes it much easier for those colors to fall off the paper (they are more like chalk). This is why you apply them at the end. Also, since the light colors don't stick to the tooth of the paper as well as the dark colors if you apply darker colors over lighter colors you can get an undesirable muddy effect. The harder dark colors just move the light chalk around on the paper.

Tooth: Refers to the texture of the paper. For our pastel assignment we will use Canson paper, which has two different textures on each side - one not wrong or right. One side has more of a machine made texture - waffle like and the other has a smaller tooth texture that's more nature like a rock surface. It's all about your preference.

Hatching: Is an artistic technique used to create tonal shading effects by drawing closely spaced parallel lines. The quantity, thickness and spacing of the lines will affect the brightness of the over all image and emphasize forms by creating the illusion of volume.

Cross Hatching: Hatch marks that overlap to help create shadow, form and volume.

Pointillism: A technique in painting and drawing where small dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. You can see examples of this in Impressionist paintings, but in modern times you also see this on a TV screen or close up of a color computer print - you will see that the image is built by tiny dots of color.

"Drawing Our Animal Friends"

Monday, January 16, 2012

Tanzania 2012: Habara za mchana! Good Afternoon!